The present invention relates to the formation of peptide derivatives and to their use in the formation of functional silicon-based composite materials.
Silicon-based materials, such as silica (SiO2) and silicone resins, are used in a wide array of applications, and there is growing interest in materials ordered at the nanoscale. The ability to order silicon-based materials on a nanoscale with organic templates such as polymers and surfactants provides opportunities to produce organic-inorganic hybrid composite materials having a variety of uses (Hou et al., Nature (1994), 368, 317-321).
Chemical synthesis of these materials generally requires harsh conditions involving extremes of temperature or pH. It has been recognized that amines and polyamines may catalyze the polycondensation of silicic acid in water to form a silica composite (Mizuntani et al., Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn. (1998) 71, 2017-2022; Mizuntani et al., Chem. Lett. (1998), 133-134). More recently, the problems of chemical synthesis have been addressed using biological or biochemical synthesis techniques. The art has recognized that certain proteins and peptides are able to produce highly ordered biosilicates under ambient conditions (Zhou et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. (1999) 38, 780-782). One particular class of peptides, the silaffins which are found in diatoms (Kroger et al., Science (1999) 286, 1129-1132; Kroger et al., J. Biol. Chem. (2001) 276, 26066-26070) have been observed to produce silica nanospheres and have recently been exploited in the production of optical materials (Brott et al., Nature (2001) 413, 291-293).
There remains a need in the art to provide additional silicon-based hybrid materials.